I really thought this was an interesting question and followed it the throughout the last day, clearly the answers "rising to the top" so far are not curent. Most answers so far have been about "why" and even that is being kind to the sarcasm presented so far. Part of the problem here is that it seems that nobody that's responded so far started their career after 1980 and that's either a sad fact about the business or something that Slashdot should note. Personally, I started writing BASIC in a high school class as my first exposure and then worked in C initially in college before moving to C++. Later in school assembly, Java, and PHP were used and then afterwards I added purpose specific languages like OpenGL, Javascript, "Flash/ActionScript", and JSP/ASP/Python(yes, I include Python there as that's all it's worth).
The more worthwhile answer to the question though is that I learned "how" to program, meaning algorithms, style and debugging in my second and third years in college at U of Michigan.

So what? They're covering themselves for when somebody uses them coordinate something illegal, a drug drop spot, a robbery or heaven forbid a terrorist attack. Who cares, Twitters's a fad technology with less usefulness than direct mail...which the irony of to those pushing it can't be lost on... The concept is e-mail via the phone...which is an electronic letter which is....

He just saw a ship going down? The types of conflict-of-interest here aren't exactly rare in the Fortune 500 board member world. Regardless, this should be noted as a far larger loss to Apple than is being written about at this point.

No, the issue is that to justify their claims they're going to expose numbers that are going to infuriate their product(artists and writers). They can't burn that bridge and it's worth more than a single copyright/sharing case and possibly all of them. Of course this assumes there's a disconnect in what they'd have to show as evidence to support their loss claims and what they've cited when paying their talent...would like to set up the over-under on that difference or shall I?

Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @03:58AM
from the never-step-twice-into-the-same-stream dept.

Barence writes "Microsoft has confirmed it is preparing to launch a music streaming service. The service will be a direct rival to Spotify, hugely popular in the UK (but unavailable in the US), which allows users to stream music for free in return for listening to around a minute's worth of advertisements every half hour. 'It will be a similar principle to Spotify but we are still examining how the business model will work,' said Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN." The article claims that the new service will boost the popularity of the Zune player, though how this is to happen is not explained. There doesn't seem to be a close tie-in between device and service, as there is between the iPod and the iTunes Store.